


Ending to Start Again

by WednesdaysDaughter



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Wolf, Dimension-Hopping Rose, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Non-Linear Narrative, Pete's World (Doctor Who), Pete's World Torchwood, Post-Episode: s02e13 Doomsday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-14 05:03:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17502107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WednesdaysDaughter/pseuds/WednesdaysDaughter
Summary: Perhaps there is a universe where she never let go; one where the lever stayed in place or her hands never slipped. Maybe she’s the one left behind and he’s stuck on an Earth with zeppelins and the Tyler’s. These silly daydreams float in and out of her brain in hopes of distracting her from the current trauma by creating a new one.





	Ending to Start Again

**Author's Note:**

> It's been nine years since I wrote DW fanfic and I've come a long way. This re-watch had been the best/worst decision of my recent life. Hopefully all my emotions are good for something.

Somewhere out there the Earth is consumed by the sun.

 

 

Her hand is damp; entwined with his as she watches her home float in the vastness of space – trillions of dust particles dancing through the darkness in a mad dash to a finish line that no longer exists. It’s a story she was too impatient to read and jumping to the end feels a lot like cheating only there was no way she’d ever make it there by going in order.

The same elements that make up the blood rushing through her brain cry out and her bones long to make a connection with the grass she rolled around in as a child. The panic that once gripped her flees with each timid exhale until she’s wilted; a smoldering twig in a cracked pot. With hesitant steps she enters the TARDIS and flips back to the beginning where she takes in the familiar sights and sounds of a time that accepts her wholeheartedly.

The salt from her chips tastes like the tears that will slide slowly down her flushed face 5 billion years in the future. It makes her head hurt, but instead of popping an aspirin she asks the Doctor where they’re going next.

 

 

Somewhere out there his grin matches her own; their hands warm and dry as they run.

 

\- - - - - - - - - -

 

This universe’s 1869 never saw Rose Tyler trapped in the basement of a funeral home as the Gelth attempted to get their hands on her warm flesh. The Scottish moors of 1879 did not witness her bare legs and giddy steps after a night of terror with Queen Victoria. There was no fireplace in France where Time Lords and Madame’s popped through in hopes of historical preservation. TVs did indeed become very popular and affordable early in 1953– however not because of a sentient monster sucking face with every single watcher.

Rose dives into history books with a vigor that would’ve made her old professors extraordinarily proud though it makes Mickey and Jackie eye her cautiously.

There’s nothing about Henry van Statten’s bunker in the files she borrows from Torchwood and Satellite 5 won’t be built for another 197,994 years give or take. Pointedly ignoring the research about black holes and impossible planets, Rose hunts for any clues that might speak of time traveling interference.

When she’s not rifling through rusted filing cabinets Rose is writing down every adventure she’d been on – in order – though it makes no sense from a timeline’s point of view. Rose stopped believing in the flow of linear time yesterday and decades before that. It used to drive her a bit mad when she tried to visualize how far she’d traveled in both directions. Those nights spent cradling her existential dread passed in a haze of lukewarm cups of tea and a melody the TARDIS hummed when sleep eluded her.

Nightmares occasionally crowded around her only to be chased away by the Doctor who would prattle on about the predictable cycle of repairs he was forced to preform after a particularly harrowing journey. In those endless transitory moments that found them drifting in the vortex where nothing – not even the demanding presence of time – could touch them Rose used her laughter as a battering ram against the terrors with no name.

Saving each other from aliens was so ‘been there, done that,’ saving each other from psychological trauma however was the cherry on their banana split.

Nights when the clouds obscure the sky are the worst for her. Rose doesn’t have the heart to correct her mother when she says the stars look all the same; maybe it’s Jackie’s way of trying to help even if she’s wrong.

Eyes closed, Rose wracks her brain to summon the constellations the Doctor named and renamed throughout the galaxies. If she’s quiet, Rose can recall with perfect clarity the echo of the TARDIS materializing before the silence sets in and the only sound left is her sniffling.

 

Staring up at the impossible he’s holding her close in the future while she’s trapped in the past on a planet she watched die.

 

There’s a planet she can’t remember the name of because it’s mostly composed of vowels and the Doctor switched up his pronunciation six different times before she gave up. She rolled her eyes and called him clever much to his pleasure and wandered off in time to break a ‘magic’ circle set up by the natives. The smell of smoke lingered in her hair for what felt like days until the Doctor stopped by a bazaar in the Andromeda galaxy for some shampoo.

She can still smell the tang of foreign fruits when it rains.

Settling into a parallel universe feels a bit like dreaming in that there are just enough similarities to trick you; to make you forget you ever laid your head down and closed your eyes. Her favorite shop still sells orange-cranberry muffins but there’s a spice she doesn’t recognize and it settles in her stomach like a stone.

Rose refuses to cry over a pastry, but doesn’t hesitate to lock herself in her room for days when she comes across a military report with an old Captain’s name listed beneath _fatalities_. She didn’t think about what it would mean for the places she and the Doctor did not visit: Parallel people who died because she never danced and an ambulance was blown to bits.

Mickey plies her with alcohol and his red eyes watch her toss and turn in a realm he does not have a key to. If he is surprised to hear jazz music behind her office door at Torchwood he keeps it to himself but is grateful all the same when he catches her twirling with a smile soft against her lips one cloudy Tuesday morning.

Something settles under Rose’s skin after that and her sad eyes take a vacation only to be replaced with a determined stare strong enough to make tree branches straighten in attention. Scientific journals are devoured and she doesn’t hesitate to pick the brains in Development when something strays beyond her grasp.

Pete is a great source of encouragement and teaches her how to dodge paparazzi until the articles about the mysterious heiress become more trouble than they’re worth. She tells him about her real Dad, tells him how she set loose destruction upon the world when she saved his life. He tries to imagine being worthy of such love and devotion and the way her eyes glimmer when the story ends makes him wish he were another Peter Tyler.

“Right now, he’s dying,” she whispers to a ghost.

“He’s huggin’ me and dashing out the church doors to get hit so he can save the world – so he can save me.”

Pete knows better to say that it’s in the past. He figures past, present and future mean different things to a time traveler. Instead he takes her hand and squeezes until Jackie waddles down the stairs to offer them a cuppa.

He made the mistake of brushing her off once even after seeing bits on him in her smile. He can’t take the place of a dead man – even if that dead man is himself – but he can make sure she wants for nothing in a place she might never call home.

 

“It had horns you know, that old beastie.”

“Oh my God, it was the Devil. The Devil said I was gonna die!”

“It lied.”

His voice cuts her argument into tiny pieces until she’s left holding herself, leaning against the TARDIS’s console that she once pried open. Rose briefly longs for that golden light; for the ability to see everything she was never meant to.

As if reading her mind, the Doctor reaches out and holds her for what feels like the millionth and first time all in one. She lets his warmth and the TARDIS’s hum wash over her until Rose’s senses fall away and she simply floats inside a blue box outside the parameters of conventional existence.

It could’ve been hours that he held her and she’d never know. The Doctor does though and by the look in his eyes Rose knows it wasn’t one of their typical embraces lasting no more than sixteen seconds by her count once. It lasted a second and an eon simultaneously and it’s that brilliant terrifying thought that follows Rose into a parallel world where time is so uncomfortably straight.

 

Somewhere out there she is promising him forever while he is burning up a sun just to say goodbye.

 

\- - - - - - - - - -

 

‘Complicated’ doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what happens when the stars disappear. She might not be the first person to notice it, but she tells her team long before the politicians start grasping at straws.

If time had lost most of its meaning to Rose while living in the TARDIS it threatens to disappear completely once she initiates the jumps. She is not so naïve as to believe that her tenaciousness would’ve lead to a breakthrough when the laws of physics were stacked against her from the beginning. The whole while the world is panicking, Rose is burying her guilt when she realizes the darkness is necessary for her canon.

The cracks that didn’t exist before are blooming beneath certain destruction and adrenaline settles behind her ribcage like it did when he first grabbed her hand.

“You’ve got that look in your eyes again,” Mickey comments one day she forgoes sleep when promising data lights up their screens.

“What look?”

She knows what he’s going to say before he does and their eyes meet over a clipboard Jake shoves into Mickey’s hand at 1:45AM on a Sunday.

“Like you never stopped traveling with him,” Mickey looks over her shoulder as if expecting the TARDIS to be there, “like you were born for disaster.”

Rose recollects how it felt to hold herself as a baby before the church erupted in chaos and the Doctor was taken. Rose wants to tell him about the Devil and about werewolves and how it felt to be strung upside down as a sacrifice to a local deity. For as long as she could remember Rose had felt there was something beyond her reach; confirmed by some lush on New Year’s Eve, clinging to the brick like a breeze would knock him down. His words kept her hanging on during the mundane life of a shop girl. She’s risen above fear and stagnation to become this person standing in the middle of Torchwood not as a worker bee, but as a Queen.

“I ‘spose I was.”

 

A timer set for twenty minutes is the only thing that keeps her grounded in the moment when she lands on a barren Earth.

She’s seen war zones before, but a completely leveled London leaves her shaky beneath the crumbled arch of a burning library. Bodies litter the streets and those that are still gasping for breath thank their God that the last thing they see is a rush of blond hair and terribly kind eyes. She doesn’t have time to bury them before the beeping starts, but they follow her back to Pete’s universe and she nearly walks into a streetlamp when she sees them the next day so very alive.

‘ _Just this once everybody lives!’_

She wonders what her Doctor would make of all this and schedules a jump the next day to find out.

She lands in a desert one time, right in the middle of the ocean four times, and in a back alley where she nearly gets mugged by a desperate addict who was just trying to escape – like her. She never lands in the same universe twice and none of them are hers.

“How can you tell, I mean besides the obvious?” Jake asks her as she patches up the laceration on her right forearm from porting into a window.

“What if you get to a London with no Zeppelin’s?

Rose doesn’t flinch when the antiseptic bubbles inside the wound and focuses on Jake’s question because it’s one she’d asked herself multiple times since the project was green-lighted.

One obvious answer is her cell phone: It’ll connect and she’ll make a call to a number she saved after aliens invaded London the first time. A scientific solution for a group of people waiting to hear she hasn’t completely gone around the bend.

The one she gives has less to do with logic and more to do with instinct.

“I’ll just know.”

 

She comes so far only to watch them wheel a gurney away where his body can be studied. The sonic screwdriver burns a hole in her pocket and she’s too tired to cry.

 

Rose sees a bit of herself in Donna and wonders if he does too.

She wonders if that makes it easier for him or if it hurts twice as much. Rose wants to know where they’ve been and who they’ve met; wants to know if Donna makes him laugh with his whole body or if he talks about his past.

Sarah Jane’s voice sticks closely to Rose throughout the whole ordeal and when it finally happens; when Donna is lying on the ground dying it breaks Rose’s heart just a little bit because surely no one is worth this kind of pain. She thinks of her dad and settles in to stay until Donna goes.

Two words: Two words that once inspired fear and suspicion in her until she understood. Her mouth forms the words as she prays silently and desperately for Donna to remember them.

 

‘ _I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space; a message to lead myself here_.’

 

She’s asking him to tell her what really happened.

“I want the whole story and not just some tidbits you think will get me to stop askin’,” Rose demands sometime after New Earth. Her dreams are muddled – pieces missing that don’t make sense cause she doesn’t glow normally. The TARDIS seems closer than she once did, like Rose can decipher her murmurs with an ease that didn’t exist before.

There’s a song she can’t remember the words to drifting amidst the back of her mind and it’s driving her up a wall.

It’s his eyes that remind her how old he is.

He’s reluctant to tell her, but she listens closely as he explains how the power coursing in her body nearly took her life. She puts two and two together and her voice breaks when she apologizes because she killed him – made him change.

“Rose Tyler,” he whispers in her ear while staring at a black hole, when he finds her clutching a cold cup of tea after saying goodbye to Chloe Webber, they’re inches apart and her eyes sting making him blurry as he reaches out to wipe them away.

“It was never a choice.”

She buries her face in his chest, clinging to the hushed ‘thank you’ that passes unbidden from his lips. ‘You came back,’ he does not say even though the awe shakes his foundations like the quakes before Pompeii’s destruction.

“Always,” she replies with unwavering certainty before the Time Vortex takes her mind.

“Always,” assures her smile back where it belongs when he sweeps her into his arms.

“Always,” cries her heart as her feet pound against the pavement on an abandoned London street.

 

‘ _Have a good life. Do that for me Rose, have a fantastic life._ ’

 

His voice strikes her right between the ribs one ordinary day. She’s pouring over mathematical probabilities in an empty office – the voices of her coworkers swallowed by the lift as it descends in time for ‘Thirsty Thursday’.

She’s standing in a dimly lit TARDIS staring at a hologram more lifelike than all her hazy dreams combined. Her hands ache from pounding on the console, pulling at her hair, muffling her sobs that pull at Jackie’s heartstrings. His last wish for her and years later she’s still not paying attention.

The guilt is unexpected, but not unwarranted.

Pulling herself in endless directions, Rose knows this is not what he would want for her and while she’s never been soft-handed, the callouses she’s developed speak of sleepless nights and an unwillingness to let go.

Somewhere – perhaps in a dream or in a universe she’s fought to forget – someone once said that nothing good came from nostalgia.

“It’s long past time for me to let go.”

Rose is certain there’s an unspoken message in that phantom’s words – aimed directly at her heart, said not in malice but acceptance and missing the mark by a mile. Eyes stinging bitterly, Rose shoves the emergency program far from her waking mind only to be revisited again and again in a ceaseless cycle she’ll never properly grasp. It’s happening now as she stands on the launch pad and later when she’s in bed crying over another hologram that left sand in the cracks of her new jacket.

 

There are a million different words for love, but heartbreak sounds the same in any language.

 

\- - - - - - - - - -

 

They keep missing each other.

 

By a fraction of an inch: A margin so narrow no one can quite calculate the odds of it reoccurring in different jumps. There’s no equation for time being a dick apparently and Rose’s frustration bleeds through her professional mask when she glimpses the back of his head on a tiny screen. She does not kick a hole in the wall of her office, but it’s a near thing.

“You’re getting closer Rose,” Mickey placates choosing to ignore the glare she tosses in his direction, “save your anger for the bastards stealing the stars.”

She doesn’t tell him he’s right, but he knows it all the same. He’s been a force of his own since his Gran passed and it’s his determination that gives her hope after every difficult jump.

 

She’s lost in the jungle of Cornafess.

Her throat hurts from all the shouting she’s done in the span of four minutes and the lack of a reply isn’t helping the panic curled around her tongue. Something chased them away from the TARDIS the second they set foot on springy moss. He lunged left while she spun right and the shout of her name echoed in the vast greenery long after he could no longer see her.

The foliage looks the same and something in the back of her mind tells her she’s been going in circles since they split up. In the corner of the eyes she sees a flash of brown, but by the time she turns it’s gone. Something steps on a twig nearby and her pulse is pounding a drum solo in her veins.

“Rose!”

She expects to see him right behind her but there’s just empty space.  

“Doctor!”

She coughs to dislodge the fear building in her voice when something touches the back of her neck.

300 years in the past she lunges forward, nearly falling out of bed, at the same time she screams and bolts away from the Doctor who spends the next vexing seconds trying to get her to stop running.

“It’s just me!” he soothes.

“Should’ve put a bell on you,” she mutters twice; both times with a racing heart and sweaty brow. Rose catches her breath and wills her body to calm down as her eyes track the shadows dancing on her bedroom walls. Rose catches her breath and wills her body to calm down as her eyes track the forest perimeter for any more surprises.

The Doctor takes her hand and leads her back to the TARDIS.

Rose walks silently through the kitchen for a cuppa; alone.

Perhaps there is a universe where she never let go; one where the lever stayed in place or her hands never slipped. Maybe she’s the one left behind and he’s stuck on an Earth with zeppelins and the Tyler’s. These silly daydreams float in and out of her brain in hopes of distracting her from the current trauma by creating a new one.

Insomnia plays a busted projector at 3AM, rolling her worst hits over and over again until secondhand embarrassment sends her pacing from room to room in her tiny flat. The world’s quiet in this neck of the woods and bustling just beyond a white wall that bears her mascara stained tears.

 

He said it was impossible. Funny how that word stopped meaning anything to her the first time she saw her name on a monument built to honor those lost at Canary Wharf.

 

His arms wrap around her waist and she’s barricaded in a library – face flush and adrenaline flooding her system when they’re together again. They’re dancing in the TARDIS, Jack cutting in at some point to spin them both, grinning bright enough to light up the sky. She can’t breathe amid her aching lungs on a beach that’ll give and take in equal measure.

While she’s waiting on a derelict ship for him to return she’ll be looking at different stars beyond a giant window;  contemplating if she was always going to end up here. The timelines she saw whist masquerading as a goddess have long since been wiped from her fragile mind. What else did she do as she watched the birth and death of all things? Scattering two words across time and space seems too simple a task for the being the Doctor witnessed.

Did she engineer their first goodbye?

For a fraction of time her brain held all the possible outcomes of their travels – every end and every beginning. Was she crying because of the physical pain or the emotional? How many partings did she see before she said ‘no more’? With the wave of her glowing hands Bad Wolf could’ve engineered a forever that even the Doctor could not foresee.

It is a question she asks that has no answer.

‘ _An ill-gotten forever is better than none_ ,’ she tells herself every day for a year until the guilt no longer has a hold over her.

She can feel his eyes on her as if they’ve never looked away: A weighted blanket hugging her every curve; shifting with every step around their tiny kitchen. He watches her explore the TARDIS with wide eyes and a cheeky grin every time he explains something she’s figured out already. She holds his attention in a museum where her stone duplicate stands cold and calculating: The living striking an identical pose. Blindly, his eyes jump from face to face until he sees her wrapped in pink and so beautifully put back together.

He sees her ghost in the corner of his eye alone in his blue box. Decades come and go, faces traded for another, the Doctor sees Rose Tyler in the TARDIS as clear as day. She’s falling onto her back after a rough landing, singing in the hallways after seeing The Beatles in concert, she’s watching him push through the madness and grief and guilt whenever it gets too quiet.

They haunt each other and the clock never stops ticking.

 

\- - - - - - - - - - 

 

Somewhere out there the shore is consumed by the sea.

 

 

It’s almost too much Rose wants to shout staring at the man – men – she loves more than she hates the distance between them. That morning her gut said things would never be the same; that morning she hugged Jackie and destroyed a Dalek that nearly hurt Donna’s family. Piloting the TARDIS surrounded by friends filled her soul with so much energy she felt as if she would regenerate at the slightest provocation. Two sets of eyes set her skin on fire; two identical smiles send chills down her spine and the way they both say her name provokes her signature grin setting three hearts into overdrive.

‘ _Too good to be true_ ,’ she thinks and swallows the bitter bile churning in the back of her throat when he leaves her again. Never asking, never waiting – just making decisions as if he has the right to pick and choose what’s best for her. Anger threatens to consume Rose until she feels him squeeze her hand and it washes out to sea with bits of sand.

A forever he never saw coming; a solution born from desperate, golden tears. She’s not sure who’s clinging to whom but their exhales inevitably sync - gravity keeping them close after lifetimes apart. Those words have been said again and again, but are incapable of losing their meaning.

He’s saying it at Downing Street while she’s at the end of the table. She’ll say it when offering to share a mortgage with him. He said when she was curled over his body, frantically begging him to stay.

They say it holding hands in a hospital after a bomb nearly ended their forever; both hearts pounding faithfully away in their tender chests.

‘ _I love you_.’

‘ _Quite right too_.’

 

 

Somewhere out there a girl finds her hand clasped in a stranger’s and they’re running for their lives. A stranger spends his last moments watching a girl grin in the snow and it’s all ending only to start again.

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to thank every single person who has ever written for Doctor/Rose. I've been going though fic like crazy and I'm just so inspired by these brilliant stories. I'll never tire of reading about their journey and I'm so happy I get to contribute. I hope I've done them justice as well.


End file.
